Belief in No Hell

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Nov 5, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 43.

Belief in No Hell

It used to be one of the great orthodox doctrines in leading Christian churches to teach an ever-burning hell, but the Detroit Times of July 20, 1912, quotes the Rev. T. W. Young, Baptist, as saying:

"The widely diffused ideas, in modern times, about the devil and the hell of fire and brimstone for the wicked, come from Dante and Milton, which is poetry, and not from the Bible. Some of the ancient church fathers—that fruitful source of heresy—also held fantastic views about the future torment of the wicked, but no great religious creed and no great religious denomination, as such, has ever advocated any such literal interpretation of the Bible. No present-day creed or church, as far as I know, believes in a hell of fire and brimstone. Some few straggling literalists may, but they have little or no following."

Dr. Charles M. Sheldon, as reported from the Christian Herald, says:

"I have come to believe myself in the probable annihilation of those who never respond to God's offer of forgiveness, those who never believe in Christ, and take Him as their Saviour. It seems probable that the Bible teaches that the word 'death,' as applied to the soul that always refuses to repent, means death of total extinction. . . . I can not interpret the use of a text such as we have to-day to mean anything less than that 'the wages of sin is death.'"

This certainly is hopeful.

David Eason, a minister in the Brookville Methodist Episcopal Church of Erie Conference, Pennsylvania, writes to the Brookville Republican, in its issue of July 18, 1912:

"I am not a believer in endless torture of any kind. I believe that sin will be punished according to the deeds done in the body, but it is not punitive simply, but on the contrary is remedial."

The Marietta Register-Leader of July 9, 1912, gives the opinion of several ministers from the Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches, who repudiate the idea of the literal hell, or literal fire. Some of these ministers hold to conditional immortality, as does Charles Sheldon, and that is the Bible view. Others have adopted the unscriptural view of universal salvation.

When we come to it, there will be a literal fire and a literal burning, in which the old earth will be purified, but out of that will come the glorious new heavens and new earth, in which there will be no more sin, and hell will be forever banished from God's universe.